Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies are thoroughly embedded in student life throughout Canada’s universities, they drive teaching and research priorities, they permeate universities’ public messaging, and they determine who gets to instruct Canada’s young people. A recent report by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, for instance, looked at nearly 500 active academic jobs postings at the largest university in each province. At six of those ten institutions, 100 percent of the job postings mentioned or promoted DEI.
DEI frameworks are meant to increase the population of “underrepresented” groups at universities, both as a means to battle discrimination and because having more diverse perspectives is thought to enrich the educational environment. That’s how the University of Calgary, to pick one example, justifies its Inclusive Excellence Cluster Hiring Initiative: “Inclusive excellence affirms how diversity can deepen learning, enhance critical thinking and problem solving, and fuel creativity and innovation in teaching and learning, research and artistic enquiry, professional service, and community engagement in academia.”
Framed this way, such policies can appear benign or even positive. But they explicitly call for discriminatory hiring that favours “equity-deserving groups,” which at the U of C include “women, Indigenous peoples, visible/racialized minority persons, and persons with disabilities, as well as LGBTQ2S+ persons.” The U of C’s initiative thereby does the opposite of what it claims to do. “Inclusive excellence” is not inclusive, since it actively discriminates against people on the basis of their race or other characteristics. Nor does the hiring initiative promote excellence, as it prevents many candidates with strong – and often the strongest – qualifications from being hired.
As this C2C article, which broke news of the U of C’s discriminatory practices, noted, all 45 positions specified under the initiative were explicitly reserved for targeted groups. Large swathes of the population were thus barred from each of these job opportunities – able-bodied heterosexual white males from 100 percent. A Haskayne School of Business job posting, open only to “Black Pioneer, African or Caribbean” scholars, encapsulated the initiative’s overall flavour. While that particular posting caused a minor media stir, the U of C’s policy was not modified. Subsequent research by other organizations, like the aforementioned Aristotle Foundation initiative, has shown that similar things are happening at universities across Canada.
What is intellectual diversity, and why is it under threat in Canadian universities?
Intellectual diversity refers to the presence of a wide range of ideas, viewpoints, and even methodologies in academia. It is under threat because universities increasingly prioritize DEI programs that focus on demographic diversity (e.g., race, gender) over diversity of thought. This shift has led to hiring practices that favour identity over merit, creating ideological homogeneity and stifling debate.
But the problem with DEI policies is more fundamental than that. Many DEI advocates conflate “demographic diversity” – the diversity of immutable characteristics held by groups, such as race, ethnicity, sex or disability – with “intellectual diversity” – the diversity of individuals’ mutable mental and psychological characteristics, which are in turn influenced by their education, culture and values.
Demographic and intellectual diversity are not the same. Members of different demographic groups frequently have different cultures, values and educational and political backgrounds; it is naïve if not deceptive to attribute these differences solely to race or any other demographic characteristic. There is enormous variation within groups but also immense overlap between groups. Justifying race-based recruitment on the grounds that it automatically creates more intellectual diversity, as the U of C initiative claims to do, is simply wrong.
Many DEI advocates conflate demographic diversity with intellectual diversity, but they are not the same thing; members of different demographic groups often have different values and viewpoints, but there is huge variation within groups and immense overlap between groups. (Sources of photos: (left) Unsplash; (right) cseeman, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)In reality, such a practice detracts from the principal function of modern universities — the pursuit of knowledge and innovation. Research examining the effect of demographic diversity on innovation does find that it has a positive effect. When demographic diversity is disentangled from intellectual diversity in values or educational background, however, demographic diversity is found to have a null or even a negative effect, whereas intellectual diversity has a positive effect. Thus, the overall positive relationship between diversity and innovation is driven by intellectual diversity.
Intellectual diversity – especially diversity of viewpoints in all manner of areas, including and perhaps most importantly in politics and ideology – is in ever-shorter supply at universities, particularly in social science departments. For decades, academia has leaned overwhelmingly left. Already in 2005, a paper by American and Swedish researchers Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern used party affiliation as a benchmark in U.S. post-secondary institutions and found that economics was the least lopsided social science field – with a 3:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. The most lopsided was anthropology, with a ratio of 30:1. Other researchers have demonstrated similar results.
What is the “Paradox of Tolerance”?
The “Paradox of Tolerance”, coined by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, argues that unlimited tolerance can enable the intolerant to suppress or silence others. On campus, this means universities must protect free speech, even for unpopular views, while preventing efforts to silence dissenting voices. For example, universities should not tolerate protests that physically block speakers or disrupt events, as this undermines intellectual diversity.
The left-wing ideological bias in contemporary academia can also be seen in the pattern of political donations from university affiliates such as students, staff, family members and so on. At Stanford University in California, for example, over 96 percent of such donations were made to Democrats in the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. At Harvard, the rate was 94 percent and at Columbia 88 percent. Regarding Canadian universities, a 2022 survey by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute found that 88 percent of professors identified as “left-leaning” and voted accordingly in the 2021 federal election; just 9 percent voted for conservative parties.
The True Cost
The damage wrought by such ideological homogeneity goes far beyond social isolation for those holding minority viewpoints. It also squashes free speech among academics and students alike, and dissuades right-leaning or otherwise heterodox students from pursuing academic careers. It hampers and at times destroys the careers of dissident academics (not only right-leaning ones). In Alberta alone, Frances Widdowson, Kathleen Lowrey and Paul Viminitz were all fired from administrative or professorial positions for expressing heterodox views.
When university environments force academics to compete with a wide range of perspectives, a form of ‘creative destruction’ results that leads to more robust ideas. Political/ideological diversity fosters competition. And competition breeds excellence.
Ideological homogeneity furthermore inhibits innovation and the generation of knowledge. Unlike demographic diversity, political and ideological diversity brings with it diversity in research interests, values, methodologies and more. Bringing researchers with such differences together helps a university better answer pressing questions about society.
A good example of the benefits of political diversity can be found in research on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Women make up fewer than 25 percent of people employed in STEM careers in Canada and many suggest the apparent shortfall is exclusively the result of discrimination. In their 2021 article Men, women and STEM: Why the differences and what should be done? psychologists Steve Stewart-Williams and Lewis G. Halsey examined possible overlooked factors, including gender differences in interests and comparative advantages in linguistic and spatial abilities.
And while their overall findings were ambiguous, the point is that the paper itself depended on the existence of researchers with varying interests and approaches – something only possible in an environment of intellectual diversity. When university environments force academics to compete with a wide range of perspectives, a form of “creative destruction” results that leads to more robust ideas. Political/ideological diversity fosters competition. And competition breeds excellence.
The Path Forward
Despite the seemingly bleak situation, there are many things academic institutions can do to begin restoring intellectual diversity – particularly of the political/ideological variety. Here are six broad reforms for consideration:
1. Prioritize the production of knowledge.
Universities need to make it explicitly clear that their first and foremost aim is to make discoveries and pursue truth, whether in the hard sciences, social sciences, humanities or any other specialized area. It is not to engage in political activism. They can begin by creating a simple mission statement to that effect – along with a promise of adherence and accountability.
The University of Calgary, for example, has its Ahead of Tomorrow Plan, which lays out the university’s strategy from 2023 to 2030. But instead of committing itself to pursuing knowledge and truth, the plan considers its strategy “through long-term, foundational commitments to: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility; Indigenous Engagement; Mental Health; Global Engagement; and Sustainability.” Many of these aims are clearly motivated by political activism.
It is true that universities are not currently “against” the pursuit of knowledge per se. The absence of an explicit commitment to the expansion of knowledge as the core aim, however, leaves the door wide-open for initiatives that undermine such a commitment – as is happening across Canada.
Once a university made clear that the pursuit of truth was its primary aim, the promotion of intellectual and political diversity should follow naturally. Intellectual diversity expands the horizons of students and academics alike by embracing differing viewpoints, enabling institutions to explore and address real-world issues that would otherwise be viewed through a single lens.
2. Commit to institutional neutrality.
The official political/ideological neutrality of the institution itself makes room for all viewpoints at a university. A big step towards neutrality would be for university administrations to decline to comment on particular political affairs. Such statements risk alienating students and faculty who disagree with the ideas expressed, while doing little or nothing to affect real-world outcomes.
How do DEI programs undermine merit-based hiring in Canadian universities?
DEI programs often require hiring committees to prioritize candidates from specific demographic groups, such as Indigenous peoples, racialized minorities, or LGBTQ2S+ people, often barring others from applying. For example, one report on the University of Calgary’s “Inclusive Excellence Cluster Hiring Initiative” noted that all 45 positions specified under the initiative were reserved for targeted groups, excluding able-bodied heterosexual white males entirely.
Canadian institutions can learn from the University of Chicago’s Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, aka the Kalven Report. Although published in 1967, it is still considered a signal document. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the report states in probably its most oft-quoted passage. “It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.”
In fact, many schools in the U.S., including Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse and Purdue University, have recently begun to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality. It’s important to emphasize that institutional neutrality should apply not only to university administrations but all areas they are responsible for, such as faculty and department associations (with a few rare exceptions, such as a department of theology). But it must not apply to individual students or faculty members. They should be freed to research issues and discuss their viewpoints in class and throughout campus life.
As part of institutional neutrality, universities should stop presenting awards to students, faculty or alumni for advocating a particular political agenda. Such awards incentivize people to engage in activism, even at the expense of the pursuit of truth.
Finally, universities should abolish departments for disciplines which blur the lines between academic inquiry and activism, such as critical race studies, disability studies, environmental justice studies, post-colonial studies, etc. These have a place within broader fields such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and history, but when universities create departments that explicitly promote a particular political agenda they undermine institutional neutrality. Scholars in these innately ideological areas should be absorbed into whichever non-activist academic discipline fits their work best.
A case can be made that it’s impossible for a university to be completely neutral. Many decisions essential to a university’s functioning, such as how high tuition fees should be, how much staff and faculty should be paid, and what the university’s endowment funds should invest in, necessarily have a political dimension and inevitably cause a political stir. These issues, however, concern the internal actions of the university and not the broader political sphere. They should be freely debated and discussed, and universities should remain free to decide on them.
3. End policies that exist to uphold DEI or other activist principles.
DEI principles do not favour the generation of knowledge but rather cement certain ideological viewpoints in academia. They must be done away with. This includes the dissolution of offices dedicated to advancing and imposing DEI principles. This process began in the U.S. several years ago – notably as official state policy in Florida – and can be expected to accelerate markedly with the explicitly anti-DEI policies of the new U.S. Administration.
‘Research ethics’ boards that dictate what academics can and cannot research or publish should also be reined in…The concept of research ethics has been greatly abused in recent years, becoming corrupted into a mechanism to enforce political orthodoxy and oversee increasingly minute details of academic research.
The same process must be undertaken in Canada. DEI offices may currently perform some valuable functions, such as enforcing non-discrimination or anti-harassment policies, but those should fall under other parts of university administration. Staff involved in DEI-specific policy should be laid off or reassigned.
In January, University of Alberta President Bill Flanagan announced that the U of A is replacing its extensive DEI policy with a new policy called “Access, Community and Belonging” (ACB) that will emphasize free speech, open inquiry and tolerance of dissent. Despite criticism from both ends of the political spectrum, Flanagan asserted that ACB “is more than a change in terminology” and reflects “deepened commitment to creating a university community where everyone can thrive.” If implemented in good faith, ACB could prove a welcome first step.
“Research ethics” boards that dictate what academics can and cannot research or publish should also be reined in. Research ethics have a place – in moderation. Basic principles such as informed consent, for example, are essential to ensure the fundamental liberties of people are not violated, as occurred in the past in research such as in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The concept of research ethics has been greatly abused in recent years, however, becoming corrupted into a mechanism to enforce political orthodoxy and oversee increasingly minute details of academic research. An ethics board or the editors of an academic journal should not prevent or reject a study because it might lead to ideologically undesirable conclusions.
4. Clearly support freedom of speech and academic freedom, backed by measures to protect students and faculty against intimidation for expressing controversial views.
Administrators must clearly state that they will protect freedom of speech for students and professors alike. This could take the form of endorsing the Chicago Principles, developed a decade ago at the University of Chicago, that aim to promote freedom of speech at universities across the United States. Over 100 universities across the U.S. have affirmed or adopted the principles. Canadian universities that don’t already have a stance in favour of freedom of speech should likewise do so. Without protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech, attempts to censor “harmful” research or speech will neither enable us to find truth nor prevent harm from occurring.
Even with such protections, social pressures will persist. Even with rules explicitly allowing freedom of speech across campus, the implicit tyranny generated by the prevailing opinion on an issue could inhibit or neuter the ability or willingness of people to freely express their thoughts. The idea that protecting freedom of speech should extend to ameliorating the social pressures to conform has been the view of many liberal philosophers for several centuries, from John Stuart Mill to Alexis de Tocqueville to Bertrand Russell. Genuine freedom of speech cannot flourish under the soft tyranny of majority opinion.
The environment conservative academics face across Canada, the U.S. and the UK has been ably documented by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics who announced last year that he was leaving Birkbeck College in London for the University of Buckingham due to years of hostility from radical staff and students. Kaufmann’s survey found that 80 percent of Canadian academics in the social sciences and humanities who identify as right-leaning report a hostile climate for their beliefs. The proportion was the same in the UK and was 70 percent in the U.S. In all three countries, the percentage of “very left” academics reporting hostility towards their beliefs was less than 20 percent.
The eminent Canadian political scientist Ian Brodie, meanwhile, has discussed how the hostility many academics face is at least partly a product of the application of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “repressive tolerance”. Specifically, Marcuse called for a partisan double-standard whereby left-wing movements are to be promoted and right-wing movements suppressed.
All of this must be rolled back. Attempts by administrators, faculty or students to intimidate, harass or bully colleagues or students for their views must be strongly condemned by universities and prohibited under a university’s code of conduct. Mechanisms should be created for victims to file complaints and for violations to be investigated and, where warranted, punished. The pursuit of truth on campus can only occur when bad actors cannot coerce students, faculty or administrators into self-censorship.
Administrators must also implement mechanisms to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of mobbing. Mobbing is a strategy used to attack a colleague, wearing the target down emotionally by shunning, gossip, ridicule, bureaucratic hassles or withholding deserved awards. Mobbers may fixate upon a critical incident, which is claimed to be proof that the target should be exiled from public life. Mobbing is best understood as a form of social contagion, in which people surrender their independence in favour of collective action against a target.
Kenneth Westhues, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, has written extensively on the subject of mobbing and compiled a list of ten recommended administrative measures to prevent it. Dubbed “The Waterloo Strategy”, its two most notable provisions are, first, to replace campus tribunals, which effectively function as kangaroo courts, with administrative decision-making bodies, and second, to focus on the situation, issue or behaviour in question instead of the person.
Universities should take these recommendations to heart in their procedures and general philosophy. When academic mobbing is mitigated or prevented from occurring in the first place, professors and students alike will be much more willing to freely speak about issues they care about, fostering diversity of thought.
5. Explicitly make students and faculty free to contest speakers who come onto campus – but prohibit students and faculty from preventing anyone from speaking.
The protection of freedom of speech extends to those from beyond the campus community, particularly guest speakers. Bringing in new information and fresh ideas, outside speakers are a catalyst to stimulate discussion on a particular topic. Enabling a diverse range of speakers creates opportunities to expand students’ and faculty’s perspectives. Fostering such speakers, in turn, entails protecting their right to enter a campus and deliver their presentation safely and unmolested.
In accordance with 20th century Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, whereby unlimited tolerance allows the intolerant to silence others, universities should not tolerate attempts to silence the speech of others.
In the words of the aforementioned Chicago Principles:
“Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”
In accordance with 20th century Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, whereby unlimited tolerance allows the intolerant to silence others, universities should not tolerate attempts to silence the speech of others. Such attempts have become all too commonplace, however. Students who engage in such behaviour should be sanctioned by the university administration. Those who engage in the most egregious forms of silencing, in particular physical violence, should face a zero-tolerance policy and be expelled. Equally important is for universities to stand firm on their principles and ignore pressure from anyone agitating to cancel a speaker’s event.
6. Require faculty hiring boards to be comprised of individuals with diverse political views and cultural backgrounds, and make intellectual diversity an explicit goal in hiring.
Achieving balance in political views and cultural backgrounds on hiring boards should help suppress viewpoint discrimination against academic job applicants. At present, a sizable proportion of academics admit to discriminating against job applicants with opposing political views. While this tendency is slightly more prevalent among left-leaning scholars, it is an issue on both sides, as this survey found. But since liberals dominate academia, conservatives are harmed on a net basis.
How can universities address academic mobbing and protect dissenting voices?
Academic mobbing is the collective targeting of an individual through shunning, gossip, or bureaucratic harassment, often to silence dissenting views. Universities can combat it by replacing biased campus tribunals with impartial administrative bodies and focusing on behavior rather than targeting individuals.
Some degree of bias in hiring decisions seems almost inevitable, since candidates are assessed on their credentials, including their publications, which often reveal their perspectives and political views. Creating balance in political views and cultural backgrounds on hiring boards should tip the balance towards the hiring of candidates based more on their academic strengths, research record, teaching ability and substantive relevance to the job at hand, than on their particular views and beliefs. Such balance would help board members hold each other accountable for their evaluations and decision-making, further suppressing political bias in hiring. Candidates would thus be awarded positions based on their individual merit and innovativeness, not their ideological conformity or membership in a favoured group.
Universities should, therefore, explicitly prioritize intellectual diversity in their hiring processes. One way to achieve this might be by duplicating the form of existing initiatives that prioritize demographic diversity while changing the substance, such as by creating “intellectual diversity statements.”
What are the financial incentives driving DEI in Canadian Universities?
Canadian universities rely heavily on government funding, which is often tied to DEI programs. For example, federal granting agencies like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council require DEI commitments as a condition for funding. This creates a financial disincentive for universities to prioritize intellectual diversity over DEI programs.
Many North American universities currently require job candidates to write diversity statements outlining how they adhere to DEI principles and aim to advance them. These are among the DEI policies that universities should remove; alternatively, they could modify and repurpose these policies in service to intellectual diversity by having candidates demonstrate how they would bring a unique perspective to their new campus. This would add further valuable information helping hiring boards select the best person from the pool of candidates.
The Obstacles Ahead
The recommendations advanced here should not be regarded as a model policy. They comprise a framework that, if implemented and adhered to, would increase intellectual diversity in Canada’s universities and have positive spillover effects on the generation of knowledge.
Many of these recommendations may be challenging to implement. Campus culture may prove difficult to change. Even with rules to protect freedom of speech and ensure individuals are not harassed, threatened or intimidated, the overall campus culture may remain hostile to open inquiry. If this proves the case, Canada may need to create alternative institutions similar to the University of Austin, Texas, which was founded explicitly upon intellectual diversity and open inquiry and staffed with defenders of those principles.
The financial disincentives to implement the proposed framework are also substantial. Canadian universities depend heavily on government funding and governments have been relentless in pushing DEI policies. In fiscal 2023-2024, for example, the University of Alberta received $952 million in government grants, or about 49 percent of its revenue. The University of Calgary received $806 million in such grants, or about 52 percent of its revenue.
Governments have increasingly tied funding – particularly research-related funding – to an institution’s DEI policies. As a recent report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute notes, “The commitment to [DEI] at the federal granting agencies is ubiquitous.” Such policies have appeared at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and even the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Canadian universities are financially disincentivized against getting rid of DEI policies.
But it is possible for governments to remove disincentives and even create financial incentives for universities to adopt alternative principles and policies promoting the pursuit of knowledge. The Government of Alberta, for example, already requires “annual free speech reporting” from universities in Alberta. Increasing or withholding funding based on such reporting could incentivize a university to adhere to guidelines. So could direct regulation.
Members of Mount Royal University’s staff and faculty associations protest the Government of Alberta’s Bill 18, which is aimed at limiting federal DEI-related influence by requiring researchers to gain provincial approval before receiving federal research funding, September 2024. (Source of photo: Francine Amorado/Calgary Journal)Ideally, provincial and federal governments would not allocate funds to universities tied to promoting DEI within their institutions, as the Government of Canada currently does, or that are outright contingent on DEI policies being in place. Preventing provincial DEI-related funding would require political reform within the provinces. Preventing federal DEI-related funding could happen two ways, the first being the obvious mechanism of Canadians electing a new federal government that is intent on rolling back DEI policies.
But even absent such a change, provincial governments could forbid local universities from accepting federal DEI-related funds. The passage last year of Alberta’s Provincial Priorities Act, which requires provincial entities including universities to receive approval from the province before entering any outside funding agreement, created legislative precedent for any province wishing to follow suit.
The proposed framework would thus deliver a genuine form of diversity, wherein hired faculty can demonstrate that they have unique perspectives to offer to students, faculty and the broader academic community.
Debates will necessarily have to occur about a number of issues raised by these recommendations. Questions surrounding how universities should regulate some forms of speech and expression will remain an issue, such as whether universities should allow protest encampments on their campuses, something that the University of Calgary has held differing views on over the years. Many grey areas will require administrators to delineate between speech that constitutes legitimate criticism and speech that constitutes harassment or threats.
There is room for a diversity of approaches as universities try to feel out these boundaries. Mistakes will be made in judgment, and some observers have argued that some policies in U.S. states aiming to improve intellectual diversity have somewhat stifled speech. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, however. The need is essential, for the future of our universities is at stake. And with constant scrutiny and experimentation, the best solutions to the problem will be arrived at, and progress can be made.
The Bigger Picture
A number of these recommendations hold potential to produce outcomes that good-faith advocates of DEI should also find desirable. As discussed, demographic diversity is associated with intellectual diversity. Promoting intellectual diversity in faculty hiring processes, including on hiring boards, will therefore promote demographic diversity as well. The proposed framework would thus deliver a genuine form of diversity, wherein hired faculty can demonstrate that they have unique perspectives to offer to students, faculty and the broader academic community.
For centuries, universities have been at the forefront of the generation of knowledge in Western civilization. Today they are among society’s most important institutions for discovering new technology which, in turn, generates economic growth and overall prosperity. Fostering and protecting intellectual diversity is an essential way for universities to continue participating in the pursuit of truth, benefiting all humanity for future generations.
Jonathan Barazzutti is an economics student at the University of Calgary.
This essay is an expanded and adapted version of Mr. Barazzutti’s number-one prize-winning entry in the Second Annual Trottier-Morgan Student Essay Contest.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
